Title Meanings
The cover to Welcome To New York, a 1970s Rolling Stones bootleg, is a cartoon by William Stout, showing the Stones against a grafitted wall which includes the phrase "50,000,000 flies can't be wrong - eat shit!"
The title is itself a reference to the hit song of 1927, "Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong", by Willie Raskin, Billy Rose, and Fred Fisher, most notably performed by Sophie Tucker. It is also supposed to be an estimate of the number of singles that Presley sold worldwide by late 1959.
Its evolution of the phrase into a snowclone – as expressed in the Simpsons pastiche "Fifty million smokers can't be wrong," for example – ironically ridicules argumentum ad populum, the misconception that popularity or consensus equals validity.
Read more about this topic: 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong
Famous quotes containing the words title and/or meanings:
“That title of respect
Which the proud soul ne’er pays but to the proud.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Man cannot bury his meanings so deep in his book, but time and like-minded men will find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he? What secret can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon? of Montaigne? of Kant? Therefore, Aristotle said of his works, “They are published and not published.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)